I have been making my way through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series and when I saw the adaptation of this on Apple, I decided to give it a go.
Here’s the blurb …
CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron’s debut novel introduces Sarah Tucker, whose search for a missing child unravels a murderous conspiracy.
When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker—a young married woman, bored and unhappy with domestic life—becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. What begins in a peaceful neighborhood reaches its climax on a remote, unwelcoming Scottish island as the search puts Sarah in league with a man who finds himself being hunted down by murderous official forces.
I didn’t realise this was his debut novel – it is certainly very good, with all of his trademarks. Self-serving spooks, witty dialogue and no character is safe (there is no plot armour).
It’s twisty and turny and there was one very unexpected event (no spoilers). I am looking forward to watching the adaptation now.
I watched the 2011 TV adaptation (which is great), then I read a paper copy, and now I have listened to it. Clearly a bit of a favourite.
Here’s the blurb …
Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls’ school; Mrs Beddows, the district’s first alderwoman—based on Holtby’s own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage—with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.
I really enjoyed this novel. I think it shows a slice of rural life in England between the wars. The machinations of the local council, the living conditions of the poor (lack of sanitation, not to mention birth control), the lack of welfare services (I am thinking of Lydia having to leave school to look after her siblings after her mother dies), but there is also community spirit and a hope that things will improve.
I always like a reading memoir and I follow Daisy on substack. Clearly, I was going to want this book.
Here’s the blurb …
Daisy Buchanan doesn’t have the answer – but she’s found something to soothe her incessant questioning. When Daisy first felt worry consume her as a child, she turned to the wonder of reading. Somehow, as a grown-up (or a person trying to be one) she turned to food, alcohol and online shopping instead, but these momentary highs made her feel lower still. Eventually diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder, she returned to reading and soon discovered that losing herself in a good book helped her find so much her confidence through characters, her sexuality through racy romps and more and more peace with every page.
In READ YOURSELF HAPPY, Daisy Buchanan – writer, broadcaster and host of the You’re Booked podcast – combines her own journey, the wisdom of the characters, writers and literary worlds she has loved and the advice of experts to help you read yourself calmer, read yourself romantic, read yourself free from addiction and so much more. This book will help you form one of the healthiest habits you already have at your fingertips.
This was a really personal journey about reading and how books can heal us and help us in a myriad of ways – show us different ways of living and being.
I enjoyed the first Peter Wimsey story, so when I was looking for something easy to listen to (after Villette), I chose this one. I am very keen to get to Gaudy Night, but that is book number 10.
Here’s the blurb …
Rustic old Riddlesdale Lodge was a Wimsey family retreat filled with country pleasures and the thrill of the hunt — until the game turned up human and quite dead. He lay among the chrysanthemums, wore slippers and a dinner jacket and was Lord Peter’s brother-in-law-to-be. His accused murderer was Wimsey’s own brother, and if murder set all in the family wasn’t enough to boggle the unflappable Lord Wimsey, perhaps a few twists of fate would be — a mysterious vanishing midnight letter from Egypt…a grieving fiancee with suitcase in hand…and a bullet destined for one very special Wimsey.
I love everything about these novels. The settings, the language, the way of life, the characters – Lord Peter, Bunter and Inspector Parker (clearly in love with Lady Mary). I like how the crimes are solved. But it’s not just a cozy mystery they have some emotional heft to them.
I have tried to read Villette many times. I usually get to the part when Lucy is desperately lonely and visits the catholic church. However, this time I made it all the way to the end (and it has a happy ending (well maybe a happy ending) – who knew? I thought it was going to be miserable).
Here’s the wikipedia summary
Villette begins with its protagonist and unreliable narrator, Lucy Snowe, aged 13, staying at the home of her godmother Mrs. Bretton in “the clean and ancient town of Bretton”, in England. Also in residence are Mrs. Bretton’s teenaged son, John Graham Bretton (whom the family calls Graham), and a young visitor, Paulina Home (who is called Polly), who is aged 6. Polly’s mother, who neglected her daughter, has recently died and her father is recommended by doctors to travel to improve his spirits. Polly is invited by Mrs. Bretton to stay. Polly is a serious little girl, who is described as unlike normal children.
Polly soon develops a deep devotion to Graham, who showers her with attention. But Polly’s visit is cut short when her father arrives to summon her to live with him abroad.
For reasons that are not stated, Lucy leaves Mrs. Bretton’s home a few weeks after Polly’s departure. Some years pass, during which an unspecified family tragedy leaves Lucy without family, home, or means. After some initial hesitation, she is hired as a caregiver by Miss Marchmont, a rheumatic crippled woman. Lucy is soon accustomed to her work and has begun to feel content with her quiet, frugal lifestyle.
The night of a dramatic storm, Miss Marchmont regains all her energy and feels young again. She shares with Lucy her sad love story of 30 years ago, and concludes that she should treat Lucy better and be a better person. She believes that death will reunite her with her dead lover. The next morning, Lucy finds Miss Marchmont died in the night.
Newspaper illustration from abridged version of Villette, 1909
Lucy then leaves the English countryside and goes to London. At the age of 22, she boards a ship for Labassecour despite knowing very little French. On the ship, she meets Ginevra Fanshawe, who tells Lucy that the directress of her boarding school for girls (based upon the Hegers’ Brussels pensionnat) she is attending, Madame Beck, needs a bonne for her children. She travels to the city of Villette in Labassecour where Madame Beck’s school is located. After a time, she is hired to teach English at the school, in addition to having to mind Madame Beck’s three children. She thrives despite Madame Beck’s constant spying on the staff and students.
“Dr. John,” a handsome English doctor, frequently visits the school at the behest of Madame Beck, and deepens his affection for the coquette Ginevra Fanshawe. In one of Villette’s famous plot twists, “Dr. John” is later revealed to be John Graham Bretton, a fact that Lucy has known since he once asked her why she was staring at him, but has deliberately concealed from the reader.
During the school holidays, all the teachers and pupils have either gone to travel abroad or gone back to their families. The school is completely empty except for a disabled child whom Lucy is supposed to take care of. After the disabled child is fetched away, Lucy is extremely lonely and becomes both mentally and physically ill. She goes to a Catholic church (despite being a Protestant) to confess to a priest. On the way back to the school, she collapses due to fever and mental exhaustion. Dr. John brings her to his home, which he shares with his mother, Mrs. Bretton.
Graham recognises Lucy only after she is brought to Mrs. Bretton’s home. After Dr. John (i.e., Graham) discovers Ginevra’s true character while at the theatre, he turns his attention to Lucy, and they become close friends. She values this friendship highly despite her usual emotional reserve. Lucy soon develops feelings for Dr. John and treasures the letters he sends her once she returns to the pensionnat.
Lucy and Graham meet Polly (Paulina Home) again at the same theatre after a fire, in which Polly is injured. Polly’s father has inherited the title “de Bassompierre” and is now a Count; thus her name is now Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre. Polly and Graham soon discover that they knew each other in the past and slowly renew their friendship. They fall in love and eventually marry despite the initial reluctance of Polly’s father.
Lucy becomes progressively closer to a colleague, the irascible, autocratic, and confrontational professeur, M. Paul Emanuel, a relative of Mme. Beck. Lucy gradually realises that his apparent antagonism is actually helping her to overcome her weaknesses and to grow. She and Paul eventually fall in love.
However, a group of conspiring antagonists, including Madame Beck, the priest Père Silas, and the relatives of M. Paul’s long-dead fiancée, work to keep the two apart, on the grounds that a union between a Catholic and a Protestant is impossible. They finally succeed in forcing M. Paul’s departure for Guadeloupe to oversee a plantation there. He nonetheless declares his love for Lucy before his departure and arranges for her to live independently as the headmistress of her own day school, which she later expands into a pensionnat.
During the course of the novel, Lucy has three encounters with the figure of a nun — which may be the ghost of a nun who was buried alive on the school’s grounds as punishment for breaking her vow of chastity. In a highly symbolic scene near the end of the novel, she discovers the “nun’s” habit in her bed and destroys it. She later finds out that it was a disguise worn by Ginevra’s amour, Alfred de Hamal, placed in Lucy’s bed as a prank. The episodes with the nun no doubt contributed substantially to the novel’s reputation as a gothic novel. Ginevra keeps in contact with Lucy through letters that show the young coquette has not changed and expects to live off of her uncle’s (Basompierre’s) good graces.
Villette’s final pages are ambiguous. Although Lucy says that she wants to leave the reader free to imagine a happy ending, she hints strongly that M. Paul’s ship was destroyed by a storm during his return journey from the West Indies. She says that, “M. Emanuel was away three years. Reader, they were the three happiest years of my life.” This passage suggests that he was drowned by the “destroying angel of tempest.”
There is not much of a plot to this novel, it’s more about Lucy’s progress through life. Her loneliness, her self-possession, the impact other people have on her (both well-meaning and not so well-meaning – Madame Beck and her surveillance). The story is told from Lucy’s point of view. She is a solitary creature who longs for human connection. It is definitely from the 19th century, there is a lot of thinking, religion, and discussions about duty.
This was long listed for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction in 2024. I promptly bought it and I have just finished it.
Here’s the blurb …
The gripping story of three young women who came of age and into power in a world dominated by men.
Orphaned from infancy, Catherine de’Medici endured a tumultuous childhood. Married to King Henry II of France, she was widowed by forty, only to become the power behind the throne during a period of intense civil strife. In 1546 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth de Valois, who would become Queen of Spain. Two years later Catherine welcomed to her nursery the beguiling young Mary, Queen of Scots, who would become her daughter-in-law.
These years at the French court bound Catherine, Elisabeth and Mary to one another through blood and marriage, alliance and friendship, love and filial piety – bonds that were tested when they were forced to part and take on new roles in different kingdoms. As queens, they lived through the sea changes that transformed sixteenth century Europe; a time of expanding empires, religious discord and popular revolt. They would learn that to rule was to wage a constant war against the deeply entrenched attitudes of their time. A crown could exalt a young women equally it could destroy her.
This was fascinating. I already knew a bit about Mary, Queen of Scots, having read Embroidering Her Truth by Clare Hunter, and I had heard of Catherine de’Medici (and I have watched a bit of The Serpent Queen), but I had never even heard of Elizabeth de Valois.
This book has a nice easy style (conversational almost), not burdened by jargon. The writing is good and the events so compelling, and sometimes exciting, it’s like reading an historical fiction novel.
I reserved this at the library, it took about a year for it to be my turn, but once I got started, I knew I needed my own copy.
Here is the blurb …
Phoebe Stone arrives at a grand beachside hotel in Rhode Island wearing her best dress and her least comfortable shoes. Immediately she is mistaken for one of the wedding people – but she is actually the only guest at the Cornwall Inn who isn’t here for the big event.
When the bride discovers her elaborate destination wedding could be ruined by a divorced and depressed stranger, she is furious. Lila has spent months accounting for every detail and every possible disaster – except for, well, Phoebe… Soon both women find their best laid plans derailed and an unlikely confidante in one another.
I have been trialing a new approach to reading – to ensure that I am actually taking things in – I have been writing chapter summaries (after reading each chapter twice) along with my thoughts and comments.
A snapshot of my summaries (I am using OneNote)
It did occur to me when I got to the end of this novel that I should have uploaded my summaries one at a time – or at least my thoughts on that chapter. Don’t worry, I am not going to inflict them all on you now.
This novel resonanted with me, the characters were incredibly life-like in all of their messy, kind and ordinary ways.
It was about honesty – being honest with ourselves and others. About having the confidence to choose the bigger life rather than drifting.
Phoebe is devasted by her divorce (to the point of suicide). She realises over the days of the wedding (yes days!) that her life has been contained – always trying to do the right thing, and to not be too much. When she no longer cares what people think she starts speaking her truth. I think many women would identify with this – trying to be good, all things to all people.
Lila wants the wedding to be perfect because then her life, and her marriage will be perfect.
And Gary? Well he’s just standing by letting Lila make all of the plans.
There are some funny moments and some very poignant ones.
All in all a very satisfying novel.
Some of my favourite quotes
Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversations with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal.
“I don’t know. It’s just what I believe,” Phoebe says. One of the few things Nietzsche wrote that she agreed with in graduate school. “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”
But that is how it happens, she realises. One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realises she has spent her entire life just pretending to be great.
She doesn’t have to be anything, ever. Her husband is not watching. Her father is not watching. Nobody was ever really watching, except Phoebe. Phoebe was the only person waiting in the dark to condemn herself for every single thing when the day was over.
And it was perfect. It really was. But life is strange, always thinking this one thing is going to make you happy, because then you get it, and then maybe you’re not as happy as you imagined you would be, because every day is still just every day. Like the happiness becomes so big, you have no choice but to live inside of it, until you can no longer see it or feel it. And so you start to fixate on something else – you want a child, and then the child is here, and that happiness is so big, it begins to feel like nothing. Like just the air around you.
You do things in the moment for the person you hope you might be two years from now. You don’t kill yourself when you’re sad because one day you might not be sad, and you might want to go surfing with a man you really like?
To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.
After my success at listening to War and Peace, I decided to try Anna Karenina, and this version is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal (what could be better?).
Here is the Goodreads blurb …
Acclaimed by many as the world’s greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature – with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author’s own views and convictions.
Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, ‘He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.
I am sure that everyone knows the story of Anna Karenina. And I have watched several adaptations; this one – with Keira Knightley, this one – with Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean as Vronsky, and a modern Australian version, The Beautiful Lie – with Sarah Snook.
Given that I felt I knew the story, I was pleasantly surprised by the novel. I have always thought that Karenin and Vronsky dashing and heroic, and Anna makes really bad decisions. However, now I think Karenin was good, but too christian, and Vronsky is a cad, and Anna still makes really bad decisions.
Although to be fair to Anna, this was the time before divorce, and she was stuck in a marriage with an old boring man, and she had nothing to do.
Vronsky should not have pursued her so relentlessly. He was selfish and self-centred.
Anna reminded me of Madame Bovary – that need for drama, romance and love. Not to mention blowing up their own lives. Madame Bovary was serialised in 1856 and Anna Karenina was published in 1878. Was Tolstoy having a conversation with Flaubert? Or is this a common type of woman in the 19th Century?
I did, however, like Levin and Kitty. They made up for all of the awful, selfish characters.
Miss A got this from Dymocks as an advanced reader copy. It languished on my pile until a friend read it, and then I finally dug it out. I have read the first one, and I think it is better if you read the first one before this one.
Here’s the blurb …
To most of Regency high society, forty-two-year-old Lady Augusta Colebrook, or Gus, and her twin sister, Julia, are just unmarried ladies of a certain age—hardly worth a second glance. But the Colebrook twins are far from useless old maids. They are secretly protecting women and children ignored by society and the law.
When Lord Evan—a charming escaped convict who has won Gus’s heart—needs to hide his sister and her lover from their vindictive brother, Gus and Julia take the two women into their home. They know what it is like to have a powerful and overbearing brother. But Lord Evan’s complicated past puts them all in danger. Gus knows they must clear his name of murder if he is to survive the thieftakers who hunt him. But it is no easy task—the fatal duel was twenty years ago and a key witness is nowhere to be found.
In a deadly cat-and-mouse game, Gus, Julia, and Lord Evan must dodge their pursuers and investigate Lord Evan’s past. They will be thrust into the ugly underworld of Georgian gentlemen’s clubs, spies, and ruthless bounty hunters, not to mention the everyday threat of narrow-minded brothers. Will the truth be found in time, or will the dangerous secrets from the past destroy family bonds and rip new love and lives apart?
These novels are adventurous romps. They’re full of period detail, but the heroines and heroes have modern sensibilities (at least as to how they view women). The villains are despicable and evil, and then there are the men (and women) who have extremely conservative views (Lord Duffy for instance).
There is an occasional reference to Austen – one of the characters is reading Sense and Sensibility and another character is given the false name of Miss Dashwood.
He glared at me. “I do not take my leave of you, Augusta. You will not receive my courtesy until you behave in the manner of a gentle woman and a sister.”
Very Lady Catherine De Burgh.
These are lots of fun and the end sets up the next one.
As you’re probably all aware, this novel has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. It sounded appealing so I bought a kindle copy (it’s not available in paper in Australia yet) and an audible copy. In the end I listened to it.
Here’s the blurb …
Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged 16, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.
Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.
Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?
This was beautiful. Dawn is telling us her story with lots of tangents and interesting side stories. The story unfolds slowly with gaps that get filled in later. It’s about parents, children, family life, the immigrant experience, and mistakes made when young.
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